[UFO Chicago] Sad crashing of Linux server

[Peter A. Peterson II]

Quoting Ian Bicking:
> A dedicated server of mine has been crashing in bad ways.  I don't have
> physical access, so all I know is that the services shut down (ssh,
> telnetd, apache)... not all of them, the POP server is still there, but
> not fully functional (this is odd that it works at all, since both POP
> and telnet are inetd services).  To get it back, I've had to ask for it
> to be rebooted.

How old is this box? How up to date is the software (security patches,
etc.) How likely is it that the hardware is just giving up (bad ram,
flaky disk) rather than it's being compromised? It seems to me that if
it were compromised, a hax0r would do something more interesting than
kill the services and sort of cripple POP. But maybe I'm just thinking
too highly of hax0rs.

How often does it "go down" after it's rebooted? Or how quickly?

Is the server in the Twin Cities? Or where?

pedro

-- 
Peter A. Peterson II, technician and musician.
---=[ http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/ ]=---